if check is successful, enchant monster with Inner Flame, which makes it violently explode upon death to a degree dependent on its size and leaving fire clouds around its location

It doesn't actually help you kill the monster you're targeting and because its explosion (and damage) depends on the size of the monster, you'd be inclined to enchant the biggest, more dangerous monster, gaining nothing in the process and probably damaging yourself severely with insufficient rF.

Fire Elementalists start with access to this spell - newer players are commonly discouraged from ever taking this spell ever. For good reason: You can get a cast of each Flame Tongue and Throw Flame for the same mana cost, which will probably actually help you killdude stuff. Sticky Flame is a much more useful pseudo-enchantment that doesn't check MR, at the premium of 1 more mana.

Given that it's a dual-school Hexes/Fire spell, you'd probably think that an Enchanter would use this spell, but it's the same mana cost as Confuse, which is a single school spell that will have more spellpower, thus better chance, due to an Enchanter being likely to not having trained any Fire yet. Worse still, a successful Confuse roll on most monsters is an instakill, while Inner Flame in comparison is just a waste of mana.

The enchantment Inner Flame is used by the scroll of immolation, however it applies the enchantment to _everything_ in LOS regardless of MR. This makes it extremely useful to dispatch large groups of enemies in a sea of fire. It's an incredibly powerful consumable on its own, even better with summons, Discord or multi-target spells.

The spell has massive explosion meme potential: Cast Animate Skeleton, enchant the skeleton with Inner Flame, let it attack something and blow it up with Lee's Rapid Deconstruction for tons of damage. An incredibly tedious and long way to waste turns and mana better used to outright cast LRD or confusion multiple times instead.

I am not sure why the thread is in GDD but I found that Inner flame is very good vs orc packs as FE. The trick is to Inner Flame plain orcs and then even orc warriors die very fast. It is the most mana-efficient spell in such situations and is much safer than Sticky Flame.

VeryAngryFelid wrote:I am not sure why the thread is in GDD but I found that Inner flame is very good vs orc packs as FE. The trick is to Inner Flame plain orcs and then even orc warriors die very fast. It is the most mana-efficient spell in such situations and is much safer than Sticky Flame.

To clarify, the default proposal is "remove this spell", given that the OP is quite negative.

The OP is just wrong about most of the things they say. Inner Flame has a enchantment bonus (3x IIRC), so you're quite likely to land it on any reasonable target. Used correctly, it can kill even a 3-5 sized orc band (including warriors or even stronger orcs) with 4-5 MP. That's pretty MP-efficient. Also, the last sentence makes no sense. One cast of animate skeleton plus one cast of inner flame is 4MP. This is neither sufficient for 1 cast of LRD (5MP) nor two confusions (6MP).

Inner Flame is quite fiddly to use and it's not always easy to set up useful situations. But those are not reasons to remove the spell. Besides, it can be rather fun and satisfying to use.

As for what people are "encouraged to do" and how the spell "is regarded", well, there's a lot of misinformation on the Interwebs. One shouldn't add to it.

bel wrote:Inner Flame has a enchantment bonus (3x IIRC), so you're quite likely to land it on any reasonable target.

I wasn't aware of the enchantment bonus for this particular spell, but that matters little. For a character that has trained only Hexes, the difference of chance of success between Confuse and Inner Flame is marginal at best. FE is probably casting Fireball anyway.

bel wrote:Used correctly, it can kill even a 3-5 sized orc band (including warriors or even stronger orcs) with 4-5 MP.

You can also cast Fireball.

bel wrote:Also, the last sentence makes no sense. One cast of animate skeleton plus one cast of inner flame is 4MP. This is neither sufficient for 1 cast of LRD (5MP) nor two confusions (6MP).

I have no idea why you focus on the singular paragraph (which you also misread) whose sole purpose is to generate a chuckle. No sane person would seriously consider to execute that tactic in an actual game.

bel wrote:Inner Flame is quite fiddly to use and it's not always easy to set up useful situations. But those are not reasons to remove the spell. Besides, it can be rather fun and satisfying to use.

I have demonstrated that this spell is either redundant or worse than useless, the onus is on you to demonstrate to the contrary if you think I'm mistaken, not saying that there's some nebulous "reason" or unlikely niche situation to keep this spell.

If you think inner flame is a bad spell, you're using it wrong, if you think inner flame is a fiddly spell, that's likely to get people who don't know how to use it properly killed, then you're correct.

Inner flame is actually an excellent spell, that requires a very small amount of active brainpower to use properly.

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Everything in your assumptions is wrong, and the basis for those assumptions is also wrong:

1. You don't have confuse and inner flame in the same book, there's no point in comparing them, by the time you're likely to have both level 3 spells will generally not be your primary killing tools.2. Fireball is a level 5 spell, it takes a *lot* more XP to get it online and useful than it takes to get inner flame useful, inner flame also generates flame clouds.3. Casting inner flame on the 'biggest' creature in a pack is the absolutely worst way to use it, the best way to use inner flame is from behind a conjure flame, on a weak creature that's standing next to a strong creature, by poking that weak creature with a polearm or cheap spell, in that way you can kill an orc warrior and two of his orc buddies for way less mana, way earlier than you could otherwise, you can argue that being able to block them with conjure flame in the first place makes them non-dangerous, but the XP gained is still useful.

Inner flame: Does more damage than fireball at low spellpower, is cheaper MP wise, is available sooner, and can be used to create flame clouds which can be used to block movement or do additional damage without the restrictions placed on conjure flame.

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Siegurt wrote:You don't have confuse and inner flame in the same book, there's no point in comparing them

That is there to demonstrate that you will _never_ seriously consider to use inner flame if you have a better killing tool, even if you could cast it with reasonable spellpower. Even its existence in the Book of Flames is questionable.

Siegurt wrote:by the time you're likely to have both level 3 spells will generally not be your primary killing tools.

Have you ever played an Enchanter?

Siegurt wrote:Casting inner flame on the 'biggest' creature in a pack is the absolutely worst way to use it

No, no and no. No part of that sentence said it's the best way to use that spell, I am arguing from the way the spell is designed, which gives more damage the larger a monster is (bigger as in creature size, not necessarily power). That is ignoring the way a player would want to use it, which is blowing up smaller monsters to gain an advantage, and as such should be changed or removed.

Siegurt wrote:You don't have confuse and inner flame in the same book, there's no point in comparing them

That is there to demonstrate that you will _never_ seriously consider to use inner flame if you have a better killing tool, even if you could cast it with reasonable spellpower. Even its existence in the Book of Flames is questionable.

That's true of just about everything, you don't go back and use a low level sword once you have a better one, why would you go back and use a worse killing tool? Plus having a spell at reasonable spellpower doesn't make it a useful spell, enchanters in particular are very very poor to compare it to, as the whole point of enchanters is to get next to things, which you can't do with inner flame, the two are a very poor match for reasons unrelated to spellpower.

A better comparison would be getting inner flame on a conjurer (who has trained some hexes for dazzling spray and f prism.) and in that case, inner flame would be productive and useful, although not as good as it is for fire elementalists.

Muffindrake wrote:

Siegurt wrote:by the time you're likely to have both level 3 spells will generally not be your primary killing tools.

Have you ever played an Enchanter?

Between 3 and 5 thousand of them (I have played roughly 12-15000 games of DCSS) Generally speaking with enchanters, I stumble across inner flame sometime when I'm in the process of transitioning to some offense that can deal with magic immune/high MR critters as a high-level offense, while confuse and ensorcelled hibernation are excellent, they are also all you'll need for a given subset of enemies, the ones you can't kill with those two spells probably can't be killed with hexes at all (well, other than discord) so by the time you're coming across inner flame, you've got perfect tools for killing anything that can be killed with hexes, and you need some other solution for non-hexable things. Adding inner flame to an enchanter is completely ridiculous as I said.

Muffindrake wrote:

Siegurt wrote:Casting inner flame on the 'biggest' creature in a pack is the absolutely worst way to use it

No, no and no. No part of that sentence said it's the best way to use that spell, I am arguing from the way the spell is designed, which gives more damage the larger a monster is (bigger as in creature size, not necessarily power). That is ignoring the way a player would want to use it, which is blowing up smaller monsters to gain an advantage, and as such should be changed or removed.

That was unclear from your post, (and FWIW, it doesn't actually do more damage, it just has a larger explosion) If you're saying "the larger explosion for big creatures is counter to the way you want to use inner flame most of the time" that's probably true (it does make it harder to use, and plausibly more confusing) It had always seemed like an additional drawback to make it quite as universally overpowered to me. (as the spell is extremely useful and powerful)

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My 2c: if there's the need to remove spells because the devs need to put something else, then fine. Otherwise I think Inner Fire is a nice spell. Yes, it's quirky, but that's the beauty of it: you don't have to learn to use it, but if you do it can be a nice addition. Even if you find it's too quirky to be useful, I'd argue that the game has plenty of spells that are underpowered in that sense, and that's ok. Petrify in the starting EE book is underwhelming, but that's ok: nobody said every spell has to equally good/useful.

In fact, one thing I dislike of FE is how one-dimensional they are: EE have things like petrify and passwall, IE have the armor and sleeping spells, but FE only has Conjure fire. Otherwise it's: fire damage from a distance (x2), fire damage to a group, fire damage to a person. I get that it is thematic, but it's also kind of boring. Inner Flame gives it a bit more flare (plus sending kamikaze summoned is hilarious ^_^).

While the premises of the op are wrong, the conclusion is correct. The point of comparison for FE is conjure flame, which trivializes every enemy that you would want to consider blowing up with inner flame. None of the orc band examples in this thread are convincing at all; dealing with them using conjure flame is more reliable and safer. Inner flame is a spell that looks cool and sometimes lets you kill trivial things faster, but it is not actually good. Skipping inner flame on FE is often the correct play, and generally the number of inner flames one should cast in a FE game is zero. This seems to make it a "trap" spell in the starting book. It's one thing to have spells that are not worth picking up except for the backgrounds that start with them and another to have a spell that's not worth picking up even on the backgrounds that start with it. The latter case is bad design.

Hellmonk wrote:While the premises of the op are wrong, the conclusion is correct. The point of comparison for FE is conjure flame, which trivializes every enemy that you would want to consider blowing up with inner flame. None of the orc band examples in this thread are convincing at all; dealing with them using conjure flame is more reliable and safer. Inner flame is a spell that looks cool and sometimes lets you kill trivial things faster, but it is not actually good. Skipping inner flame on FE is often the correct play, and generally the number of inner flames one should cast in a FE game is zero. This seems to make it a "trap" spell in the starting book. It's one thing to have spells that are not worth picking up except for the backgrounds that start with them and another to have a spell that's not worth picking up even on the backgrounds that start with it. The latter case is bad design.

Dealing with an orc pack safely with conjure flame means either ignoring it and getting 0 XP or prodding it to death with your trident/spear, and often having to back up and re-cast, plausibly running out of MP in the process, or using MP on attack spells, and hoping you dont run out doing so. Spending 3 more MP at the outset and killing them all isn't any more or less safe, but it does give you the XP, while letting you spend less MP. Killing an orc warrior with a pack of vanilla orcs is sometimes possible with conjure flame and tedious prodding tactics, and sometimes it's not and you have to withdraw when you run out of MP and reset the fight at the stairs, which is totally fine and safe, but doing it with inner flame is 100% reliable, equally safe, and lets you collect the XP and loot without the tedium.

When used properly, Inner flame lets you kill the same number of creatures for a lot less MP, letting you spend considerably less time resting. Also: Inner flame can't miss, which makes it great against killer bee packs, conjure flame to block off a corridor, inner flame one bee and kill 3-4 for the price and tedium of one.

Seriously it's that simple, it's a damage enhancer, you *can* play without it, but doing so is just making your life harder and more tedious for no reason at all. You don't lose anything by using it (not even the spell slots, you'll want the spellcasting to have the MP to reasonably use sticky flame and fireball by the time you can memorize and cast it productively)

Additionally, by pairing it with animate skeleton, sticky flame, or enslavement, you can effectively get (an upgraded) fireball about 2-4 levels early which is a large power gain.

If you're skipping inner flame, you seriously are handicapping yourself without any reason, and yes, it's absolutely skippable, (So for that matter is throw flame, but I wouldn't recommend that either)

Inner flame's proper comparison is to 3 flame tongue's as it's point is to do damage, and it does *way* more damage than 3 flame tongue's, comparing it to conjure flame is silly, since at in the early stage of the game conjure flame does 0 damage and by the time it does damage you have better offensive options than level 3 spells when you want to do damage quickly. (Although even at that point, inner flame is a decent enhancer for fireball)

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Siegurt wrote:You don't lose anything by using it (not even the spell slots, you'll want the spellcasting to have the MP to reasonably use sticky flame and fireball by the time you can memorize and cast it productively)

you lose a turn that you could have used to cast a spell that does something instead

killing trivial monsters more MP-efficiently is not appealing when it is paired with making 15 noise, imo

Siegurt wrote:You don't lose anything by using it (not even the spell slots, you'll want the spellcasting to have the MP to reasonably use sticky flame and fireball by the time you can memorize and cast it productively)

you lose a turn that you could have used to cast a spell that does something instead

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Firstly, Inner Flame and the FE background are not the same thing. It may or may not be true that Inner Flame is redundant in the FE starting book, but that's not an argument to remove the spell altogether.

Secondly, conjure flame is OP; everyone knows that. Saying that Inner Flame is worse than Conjure Flame is irrelevant. FWIW, I think that conjure flame is better in many, but not all situations. And nothing prevents you from using both spells (Siegurt gave an example of a bee pack).

Inner flame can be a very effective spell when used in the right way and with various conditions. My only gripe with it is that I don't typically want fire and hexes together (one or the other), and more often than not I just don't train the hexes portion up very high to be able to use it. If you think in terms of very plain style play, you may think oh it's not good because it's not totally direct like throw flame, fireball etc. but if you get out of that mindset and find more creative ways to make use of it, it's very efficient and fun.

Also, I just have to say... immolate being useless? What the heck. Immolate scrolls are awesome.

I underestimated scroll of summoning until I spectated a top player using it. Landed in Pan in the middle of panlord vault? Immolate and kill them, teleport is too slow/dangerous and there is no room to blink to.Entered a new floor and found it has open layout and is full of dangerous monsters? Immolate and kill them, the flaming clouds will create a better area for future fighting.Basically you need lots of dangerous monsters for the scroll to be efficient and this happens often late game.

I cant even remember how many FEs of varying races I have played (it's a lot) but I do remember how many times I have casted inner flame (it's zero). I didn't avoid this spell because it sucks (it probably does but I wouldn't know), but because I simply never needed to use it. That alone is reason enough to pull it from the starting book.

Any FE can, with relative ease, reach lair using only flame tongue, conjure flame, and sticky flame. Once you get to lair, get fireball properly online as well and start thinking about whatever else you need. Note that throw flame is just as useless with respect to whether you need it to survive or not. As soon as I have memorized fireball, which is typically as soon as I have the spell slots, I drop the book of flames on the ground and never pick it up again... and that is another issue with inner flame. It may have some niche uses, but it takes up spell slots and those other spells are bread-and-butter, so if you are picking up Inner Flame, you are not memorizing those spells until much later in the early game. You need to get conjure flame ASAP and you generally want to have sticky flame up not too long after that. You can live without fireball for some time here, but do you want inner flame instead? Ehhh.....

crawlnoob wrote:I cant even remember how many FEs of varying races I have played (it's a lot) but I do remember how many times I have casted inner flame (it's zero). I didn't avoid this spell because it sucks (it probably does but I wouldn't know), but because I simply never needed to use it. That alone is reason enough to pull it from the starting book.

Any FE can, with relative ease, reach lair using only flame tongue, conjure flame, and sticky flame. Once you get to lair, get fireball properly online as well and start thinking about whatever else you need. Note that throw flame is just as useless with respect to whether you need it to survive or not. As soon as I have memorized fireball, which is typically as soon as I have the spell slots, I drop the book of flames on the ground and never pick it up again... and that is another issue with inner flame. It may have some niche uses, but it takes up spell slots and those other spells are bread-and-butter, so if you are picking up Inner Flame, you are not memorizing those spells until much later in the early game. You need to get conjure flame ASAP and you generally want to have sticky flame up not too long after that. You can live without fireball for some time here, but do you want inner flame instead? Ehhh.....

You're handicapped if you aren't using it, yes, you can play with the handicap and be successful, that doesn't mean its the best way to play. You can also play the game and win a FE without training dodging or fighting, does that mean that fire elementalists shouldn't ever train them (or that they shouldn't be allowed to)? You might try playing a few games while using inner flame appropriately, once you figure out what to do with it, you'll find it actually makes the game easier.

Also, memorizing inner flame never delays me getting fireball. By the time I can and want to use fireball, I have plenty of spell slots.For reference here's how my most recent FE went (a Black Draconian as it happens)

You'll note I got fireball well before I entered the lair, and you'll note that I got it about the time I could use it. This game actually had a *below average* number of uses of inner flame for me, because of what I encountered and where. As you can see I sacrificed nothing to get inner flame (and throw flame) and both were useful.

"You can possibly play the game without it" is a terrible litmus test as to whether something should be removed.

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It's not just "possible" to get to lair without it, and here you straight up misquoted me, it's easy. I'll also note that you definitely could have gotten not only fireball up and running much earlier, but also sticky flame which is easily the most useful and powerful spell after conjure flame in the entire book. You were XL7 before you even got that memorized! So sorry man, but it is you who are showing that you can play a certain way with a serious handicap, and here you are right, this doesn't prove anything for your case.

crawlnoob wrote:It's not just "possible" to get to lair without it, and here you straight up misquoted me, it's easy. I'll also note that you definitely could have gotten not only fireball up and running much earlier, but also sticky flame which is easily the most useful and powerful spell after conjure flame in the entire book. You were XL7 before you even got that memorized! So sorry man, but it is you who are showing that you can play a certain way with a serious handicap, and here you are right, this doesn't prove anything for your case.

Skipping inner flame is a nobrainer, unless you want a challenge.

Well, I guess it depends on what failure rate and how much max MP you're willing to endure, I like using sticky flame with < 6% fail and with > 12 MP, which I didn't have until level 7, So even if I'd memorized it at level 4 I wouldn't have been willing to cast it (Nor was it particularly useful for anything on D:4 really.) Using sticky flame at that stage of the game would be both overkill and also entail far too much failure and backing up while waiting for MP to regen for my tastes.

Similarly I want < 5% fail and I want 20+ MP to use fireball which I didn't have until level 10. Memorizing sticky flame at level 4 with 20% fail and only 8 MP doesn't actually provide me any measurable benefits, since anything that I could kill with sticky flame under those conditions I could kill much more easily with conjure flame and any number of flame tongue or untrained trident pokings (with an inner flame if it helps kill more things).

Really and honestly by the time I would ever possibly want to cast either sticky flame or fireball I have had the spell memorized.

Since I can nearly everything in the lair with conjure flame, inner flame and flame tongue, and really I only want sticky flame for blink frogs (more as a matter of convenience than necessity) and black mambas (and hydras if I encounter them at close range) I hardly ever use fireball in the lair maybe like once or twice and mostly to set off an inner flame when something steps behind something else.

Really I don't know how you can claim something you have never even tried to do is harder than the thing you usually do, I mean how do you actually know that using inner flame is worse when you claim you've never done it?

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Actually, just to check my numbers I ran another FE game skipping inner flame and throw fire to see what sticky flame's fail and when I could memorize it was:Training nothing but 1 point of spellcasting (so I would have the slots) and putting the rest off my XP 50% into conjuration and 50% into fire, and putting all stat points into int (not using body armour, as draconian with 15 starting int)

I maintain that the *earliest* I would have ever been willing to risk casting sticky flame would be level 7 when I memorized it in the prior game.

For fireball:

XL7: 43% failure red danger level, 11 max MP, only have 4 spell slots so I would have to train .5 more spellcasting to be able to memorize it (at the expense of slightly lower conjuration/fire)XL8: 24% failure, red danger level, trained another point of spellcasting (to a total of 4) as it was cheaper than fire/conjuration for the spellpowerXL9: 16% failure, yellow danger levelXL9.5: 8% failure, white danger level, 15 MP, probably usable now.XL10: 3% failure, reliable source of offense now.

I probably *could* use fireball at XL9, I probably wouldn't want to until 10, and even then I probably won't actually need it for anything until 12 or so.

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After testing out inner flame on an OgWz, I had some fun times with exploding both my enemies and my ancestor or summons. However one idea I had to make the experience better was adding smite targetting, so you can better select your explosion location and, for example, not getting blocked by your own summons to the target you want to explode.

Since people barely use this spell, I think a small buff to start will not do anything bad and more people might try it out after it is changed.

In addition, I would start using inner flame if the spell level was decreased to 1.

I always run out of spell levels, and the opportunity cost of memorising a level 1 spell is 3x smaller than that of a level 3 spell. It is my perception that inner flame is not worth the opportunity cost, whereas many level 1 spells often are.

petercordia wrote:In addition, I would start using inner flame if the spell level was decreased to 1.

I always run out of spell levels, and the opportunity cost of memorising a level 1 spell is 3x smaller than that of a level 3 spell. It is my perception that inner flame is not worth the opportunity cost, whereas many level 1 spells often are.

As pointed out in the pre-necro'd thread above, there's no opportunity cost involved (unless you find another spellbook early and have no amnesia scroll available).

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TheMeInTeam wrote:You can't trust that you'll find even 5 amnesia scrolls across a game. Taking a spell you'll almost never use is not consistently safe.

Well, as I pointed out, 1. You should use it (it's very beneficial when used properly). 2. It doesn't cost you spell slots you need to actually use anything in the FE starting book.

So you're suggesting a short-term loss of power in exchange for a maybe-someday spell that you might need the slots for in the future, to save a single amnesia scroll (To clarify, my contention was that *if you haven't found another book yet* there's no cost to learning inner flame) In some cases finding another book can actually increase it's utility (also some god choices can up inner flame's utility, making it a better spell than it already is.)

Personally most of my Spellcasters use 1, sometimes 2 amnesia scroll across an entire game. (More if I'm trying to set up spellforged servitor, but that's more of a special case than anything, and only applies to the very late game, so I have plenty of options there) so I don't consider the possible "waste" of one on inner flame (at some unknown future point) a very high price to pay (or if I'm real desperate I'll train the extra 1.5 levels of spellcasting, I mean if I'm blasting things with spells, running out of MP less isn't exactly a waste of XP)

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I guess you can make a case that picking up inner flame isn't too expensive slot-wise if you don't get good magic in a timely fashion otherwise. It's true that it's nasty with things you can make explode (hep ancestor, skeletons, S2S) in controlled environments. Usually I get other options to branch out past pure fire that are more consistently useful and it doesn't make the roster compared to spell slots available, but I can at least envision a scenario where this doesn't happen and it has a few use cases, and this is the same scenario where you're unlikely to run out of spell slots anyway.